Thomas Mann and More Sorcery

Following on from the earlier Dr Faustus post, here Mann distills some of George Sorel's Reflections on Violence : A book by George Sorel entitled Reflexions sur la violence (whose theory that)...in the era of the masses, parliamentary discussion would prove utterly inadequate as a means of shaping political will; that in the future what was needed in its place were mythic fictions, which would be fed to the masses as the primitive battle cries necessary for unleashing and activating political energies; that henceforth popular myths, or better, myths trimmed for the masses, would be the vehicle for political action - fables, chimeras, phantoms that needed to have nothing to do with truth, reason, or science in order to be productive, to determine life and history, and thereby to prove themselves dynamic realities... It made it possible to understand that truth's fate was closely related to that of the individual, indeed identical with it - and that fate was devaluation.